"Many patients will thus repeat accurately what is spoken in any language; and they may be also able to sing correctly and simultaneously both words and music of songs in any language which they have never heard before—i. e., they catch the words as well as music so instantaneously as to accompany the other singer as if both had been previously equally familiar with both words and music. In this manner a patient of mine, who, when awake, knew not the grammar of even her own language, and who had very little knowledge of music, was enabled to follow Mlle. Jenny Lind correctly in songs in different languages, giving both words and music so correctly and so simultaneously with Jenny Lind, that two parties in the room could not for some time imagine that there were two voices, so perfectly did they accord, both in musical tone and vocal pronunciation of Swiss, German and Italian songs. She was equally successful in accompanying Mlle. Lind in one of her extemporaneous effusions, which was a long and extremely difficult elaborate chromatic exercise, which the celebrated cantatrice tried by way of taxing the powers of the somnambulist to the utmost. When awake the girl durst not even attempt to do anything of the sort; and, after all, wonderful as it was, it was only phonic imitation, for she did not understand the meaning of a single word of the foreign language which she had uttered so correctly."
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(Miss Frances Albert Doughty, in The Critic, 15 June, 1895.)
"The strength of 'Trilby' as a novel lies in the exquisitely dear realization of the good in the girl's nature, which the fine art of the author has been able to give to the reader. The divine in the Laird, in Taffy and in Little Billee responded to the divine in that undeveloped girl, and to them the angel in her was the real Trilby in spite of all her past experience. But idealism and realism in this charming story are not quite happily balanced: the reader receives a blow on the spiritual side of his being from the manifestation of an agency in the universe that is endowed with an all-conquering malevolence, something extraneous from the individual and yet able to arrest in her the growth of the budding germ of holiness and moral beauty, a power triumphant even at the moment when her spirit was about to return to the God who gave it. Without Svengali there would be no novel of Trilby; nevertheless, he is the sole blot upon it."
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(San Francisco Argonaut)
"Perhaps the most surprising circumstance connected with 'Trilby' in the eyes of American readers is the way the book has been received in England. At best it has been accorded lukewarm praise, and the tone of its reviews has run the gamut down to downright slating. Some have been spiteful enough to be exceptionally entertaining. Of these, that of The Pall Mall Gazette is the most striking, the reviewer of that journal showing himself to be (as an exchange puts it) a master of vituperative diction. To this reviewer, 'Trilby's' three Englishmen are 'British prigs cut in pasteboard,' and their biographer is denied even the poor ability to express himself in grammatical English."
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To the Editors of The Critic:—
If there yet remains a word to be said in criticism of this book, it may, perhaps, be in regard to the musical part of it. Whether intentionally or not, du Maurier has certainly added an instance, which tends to prove the theory true, that music in itself is neither elevating nor refining. Svengali is drawn with inimitable skill, and with so much realism that the reader feels that he must have been known and hated by du Maurier in all his repulsiveness. And yet this loathsome creature has the power of so seizing and expressing the noblest works of the great masters of harmony as to move his hearers to tears, to sway them at his will by the tenderness and feeling he puts into the notes. It is a hard thing for a music-lover to comprehend, that a man of low and vicious life, and utterly without aspirations, can so express the penetrating beauty that lies in music more than in any other art. It shows, too, that music gives us only what it finds in us, and proves the folly of "program music," or music with a translation.